July 26, 2011

The U.S. Marshal's Service has blocked reporter's access to the U.S. District Courthouse in Brattleboro, where Herald reporter Susan Smallheer is attempting to cover the latest Vermont Yankee hearing. Saying that the press (Smallheer and reporters from the Brattleboro Reformer and VPR) had "accosted" the attorneys for Entergy at the last hearing, Deputy Marshal Terry Martin refused to allow Smallheer into a public area of the courthouse. Martin refused to say who issued the order or on what authority and refused to let Smallheer speak with the officer.

June 14, 2011

I'm probably addressing the wrong audience in this post, but maybe you know somebody who it fits.

Several readers called to complain about our removing the stock listings from the print version of the paper, as they came in about 7:30 and when we first lost our press in the recent flood, we had a 6 pm deadline. It's always hard to say how many readers use a given feature like that in the print edition, until it goes away.

As it was clearly popular, we added in an online ticker in the business section, but that didn't help much for people who prefer to read us only in print.

We then went to running the stocks a day late, before finally sorting out with our provider, Associated Press, a way to get most of the information in time for the print deadline.

The compromise involves omitting the mutual funds, but given there are hundreds of funds and we could publish only a handful, I hope it won't be an inconvenience. Once we can get slightly better deadlines, we also hope to add the results for Fortis to our report. Fortis, which is buying CVPS, is on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and AP has those results just a little later than the NYSE ones.

June 07, 2011

June 06, 2011

Having the mayor drop in with a bombshell is almost standard operating procedure around the newsroom. It's not like Mayor Christopher Louras is the only politician to hand out news stories too late in the day to get opposing voices into the reporting, he's just the only local one.

So it wasn't a huge surprise to have Louras drop in with a news flash; given our early deadlines, finding out at 4 pm was a bit more rushed than usual. The story is that the city is closing Dana Center to public use, as of Friday.

As a result, the story in tomorrow's paper is a little desultory. We will be filing an update to the website once the print version is out the door, and another after reporter Gordon Dritschilo attends tonight's Board of Aldermen's meeting. Then tomorrow morning, we'll have a reporter and photographer at the Dana Center to talk to users about to be displaced.

Do you have any memories of the Dana School? Are you affected by the closure? What about the timing of the decision? Drop me a line at randal.smathers@rutlandherald.com or reply to this post, on the website or on Facebook, and we'll follow up as best we can.

June 05, 2011

Mayor Chris Pieper of Armstrong, British Columbia, has the on-ice edge over Mayor Christopher Louras of Rutland, with the Vancouver Canucks now up 2-0 over the Boston Bruins. But instead of rubbing it in, in stereotypically polite Canadian fashion, he notes how many Boston ties there are to B.C. ...

Mark Recchi "could be Mayor of Kamloops (a city about an hour northwest of Armstrong) by just saying he wanted the job. He is probably the most popular and respected person the city knows."

Zdeno Chara, who played junior hockey in B.C. "The Prince George junior player got to see all of our province and knows personally how much BC people love their hometown hockey."

And, most of all, Bruins demigod Cam Neely, who grew up on Vancouver Island, was drafted by the Canucks and sent to Boston in one of the most unpopular trades in Canucks history, of whom Pieper says "I wish he would run for Mayor of Vancouver."

But Louras wins the best line of the exchange, after noting how Tim Thomas is a fellow UVM alum, by praising Chara: "And they arguably have one of the best defensemen in the NHL, who proudly carries on the tradition of strong, tough players of Irish descent, 6’9” Zden O’Chara."

May 24, 2011

I am signed up to run in the Crowley kids' mile with our 7-year-old on June 12. I shouldn't have to train to keep up with a kid with an 18-inch inseam, should I? Even one who's in his first-grade running club ...I see that my best mile pace determines how healthy I'm likely to be in later life ... my desire to see how fast I could run a mile is tempered by this from the NYT blog:

Dr. Church "sounded another note of caution about the mile-time benchmarks. “I’m nervous about people testing fitness on their own,” he said. “I don’t want a 45-year-old sedentary male to go out and run a mile as fast as he can.”

May 10, 2011

Voting is under way on the Giorgetti recreation center. It would be great to see more votes cast than in the fall ... unlikely, but great. It would put the issue behind us definitively.
Rutland City residents: Have you voted?

May 04, 2011

From a linguist's standpoint, there's a fascinating piece on the Atlantic's site about how a school teacher's thoughts on Osama bin Laden's death were merged with a quote of Martin Luther King Jr.'s and have been widely disseminated as MLK's words.

At this point, the "quote" has been repeated millions and tens of millions of times on Facebook and Twitter. Given how many people still misquote lines from movies ... "Play it again, Sam," from Casablana, for instance ... even though the originals are available all over the Internet, DVDs, etc., I expect the entire quote will be attributed to MLK from now until eternity ... sometimes with cross-links to posts like this.

So, for the record, "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy," is the work of Jessica Dovey, a 24-year-old English teacher in Japan.

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that," is MLK Jr.

Somebody dropped some quotation marks, somebody else Tweeted the wrong bit and the next thing you know, Martin Luther King has new words.

May 02, 2011

We got a heads-up around 10 p.m. that President Obama was going to have a major announcement last night, scheduled for 10:30. It was quickly clear it wasn't a routine press conference, so we tore up A1, which was mostly done at that point, to make room for a story.

The press conference went off at 11:32, which is two minutes after our normal deadline to send the last page to the press. The first wire copy moved at about 11:45, but was woefully short. By midnight, we had enough to cobble together a short story for A1. Kudos to the beat reporter covering the Phillies game last night, who posted an update from the ball park. What you see on the front page of today's print edition is everything on the wire at midnight, plus two paragraphs we added from the press conference. Knowing we couldn't wait any longer, we sent the page.

Murphy's Law being what it is, that was the cue for the system to stop cooperating, which pushed our print edition back even farther. I apologize to our readers for the delays.

To keep from a 24-hour lag on the news, we called reporters in to start calling people at 7 a.m. to put together a full Vermont reaction story, from the state's congressional delegation to people on the street. Those are being posted on the website as they become available (Peter Welch fairly early, now Bernie Sanders; Patrick Leahy as soon as he puts out a statement.) We will be pulling them into an easy-to-find package, with a photo gallery, as soon as we can, as they are getting to be so numerous as to be cumbersome; plus we have added two new pages of coverage to our e-edition (pages D7 and D8 exist only in the replica edition). Those will be available here as soon as they process through the software that turns our PDF output into the searchable, clickable e-Edition ... it usually takes an hour or so.